One thing I love about all Windows news products is the remote desktop features. I used PCAnywhere previously, but I find remote desktop now almost as good, I’d like to see file transfer like PCAnywhere has, but remote desktop is free so that’s a bonus.

One of the tasks that I am faced with with my network setup is port forwarding through my router. There are two problems that I encountered when dealing with RDP forwarding. The first was what is the RDP port number. With a quick google search, I found that the standard RDP port is 3389.

Now that you have the port number you can simply go into your router and forward that port and after enabling the remote desktop feature it will work from outside your network as long as you know your IP address or have a dynamic dns service like me. use. To enable remote desktop in Windows XP and Windows 2003, go to the start menu, find my computer icon and right-click on it. Select the properties option from the drop-down list and then click the remote label in the window that appears. There you will see the two checkboxes, check the second box and then click the remote user button. Make sure the users you want to have access to are in the list and then click OK until you have exited all windows. RDP is now enabled on your machine.

So this simple setup would have worked for my network, but the problem became that I have multiple servers that I want to access along with my desktop. Now I could just remotely to my desktop and then to the other machines from there as they are all on the local network. However, this would create a lot of data to be transferred, with limited upstream speeds on your broadband connection, you don’t want this, and it will cause performance issues with RDP. So I had two options, I could change the registry entry as stated in the article. I’ll paste that solution here in case that page has a problem at some point:

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WARNING: If you use Registry Editor incorrectly, you can cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that you can solve problems that result from using Registry Editor incorrectly. Use Registry Editor at your own risk.

You can use the Remote Desktop feature in Windows XP Professional to connect to your computer from another remote computer. WARNING: The Remote Assistance feature in Windows XP may not work properly if you change the listening port. To change the port on which Remote Desktop listens:

Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe).

Find the following key in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetControlTerminalServerWinStationsRDP-TcpPortNumber

On the Edit menu, click Modify, click Decimal, type the new port number, and then click OK.

Exit Registry Editor.

NOTE: When you try to connect to this computer using the Remote Desktop connection, you must enter the new port.

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The other option I had was to go to my router and specify another external port number and then point that port to 3398 at the IP address of the machine I wanted to go to. I chose this second option because it was less time consuming and it worked for me. An attractive aspect of the ability to change the RDP port number is security. If you leave the standard port number, anyone will know to check that port to see if you have Remote Desktop enabled and potentially compromised your network. However, please let me know if there is something wrong with the registry fix and if there is, I will simply remove it from this article.